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My SIL works for Cigna and she told me that most of her customers started scrutinizing their insurance offerings once the ACA passed, so HL investigating what their group insurance sales rep sold them isn't out of the ordinary.

And again, SCOTUS doesn't care about that. Their only job is to apply the Constitution.

First, if you don't bother to check what contraception is covered for years, it's a good indication it's not a central concern of the employer. It became one for some reason....

And this case was more applying the law than the Constitution. There was no 1st Amendment claim made or ruled on.

Just curious how many females select their employer based on what birth control coverage is offered in the employer's insurance plan? I'm guessing that number to be somewhere around zero. So the idea that women will change jobs over birth control coverage seems pretty ridiculous, and if someone is "at the bottom" I would think they have bigger worries than if their insurance covers the $20 a month birth control pill or not.

Sure they do, but that just reinforces the point that the ruling will affect access. And it might be more than $20 a month, depending on the type their doctor says is best.

What doesn't? The ruling applies to all employers. The SC said it's unlikely for big employers to file a claim based on religious grounds, but they don't limit their holding to closely held corps or define them, that I saw. If you can find it in the ruling, please point it out.

Please show evidence that the SCOTUS judges who ruled against HL took into account HL's business dealings in China when handing down their dissent.

Also, please show me evidence that SCOTUS is supposed to weigh in on or rule on the morality of the plaintiff when they hand down a decision.

What's with you being the self appointed thread nazi?

1) I never said China had any bearing or anything to do with the ruling. Not once did I mention how plantiff morality did or did not have bearing on the ruling. I was making a remark on Hobby Lobby's hypocritical intent when bringing the suit in the first place.

2) There are similarities to the Bush v Gore which is why I brought it up in that the conservatives justices want to completely throw out precedent as a way to make their judgements and opted to, as they love to put it, be activist judges instead where they admittedly want to make a ruling that creates a law that only applies once or just one way which is unequal and unjust when it comes to law.

If you don't really want to discuss case and law just so you can control the discussion then you are being completely disingenuous in your argument and your intent to control the topic with a stranglehold.

Originally Posted by Moderate Right

The sad fact is that having a pedophile win is better than having a Democrat in office. I'm all for a solution where a Republican gets in that isn't Moore.

Origin don't mean ****. Your using it to sidestep the issue. It's a cheap trick.

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE:I think the world vests too much power, certainly in the president, probably in Washington in general for its influence on the economy, because most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government.

Alito states in his opinion that the ruling only applies to contraception. Its no broader than that.

Also, you can certainly have strongly held beliefs about anything but that doesn't mean it trumps the constitutional rights of others.

Precedent says the government may restrict religious freedom in some cases (like in the case of the Amish paying social security taxes) but it must do so in the least restrictive way possible.

In no way does this ruling say religious rights trump all other laws. In fact, there was a famous/infamous case where someone was denied the right to take peyote since that individuals religious right did not trump the law. There's plenty of subtletys here involving the religious freedom restoration act and others.

P.S Please tell your liberal friends on FB and twitter to calm the hell down and breath into a paper bag. Its no wonder you people have the reputation of being histrionic knee jerkers.

Originally Posted by JasperL

The Court ruled on religious claims conflicting with a law applied to the general population. It has nothing to do with birth control, except that was the topic of the religious claim. But Muslim owned businesses can certainly assert laws that violate Sharia Law should be invalidated.

And who are you to say a person can't hold sincerely held religious views that require them to not serve interracial couples because they disapprove of them marrying? It conflicts with the Civil Rights Acts and perhaps other laws, but the Congress and now SC say your religious views trump those laws in some cases.

What doesn't? The ruling applies to all employers. The SC said it's unlikely for big employers to file a claim based on religious grounds, but they don't limit their holding to closely held corps or define them, that I saw. If you can find it in the ruling, please point it out.

From what I saw their ruling pertains only to "closely held" corporations/employers.
They are the ones most likely to object on the religious grounds established by the Religious Freedom Act to begin with.

I believe this is a great victory for us who are pro life. It is significant that the 5 justices who voted in the majority were Roman Catholic. God bless them.

This isn't a pro-life victory, but if you want to delude yourself by all means. This is a victory for religious freedom. In the end what these drugs do or don't do are irrelvant. It is the fact that the Greens feel that they do something against their religion as they interpret it. All the other forms of conception, which many Roman Catholics see as also against their "pro-life" stance, do not violate the Greens' religious principles.

do you really want to use the post office as a federal entity that is working well?

ATLANTA—The U.S. Postal Service cut costs and boosted its revenue for the first time in five years but still ended its fiscal year with a $5 billion loss and no end in sight to its fiscal woes.

The Post Office saved $1 billion as it consolidated facilities and 20,000 employees took buyouts. That helped it to narrow its operational loss to $1 billion from $2.4 billion.

The agency also boosted revenue by 1.2% to $66 billion in the period ending Sept. 30. The improvement was due mainly to growth in it package-delivery business, which rose 8% to $12.5 billion as postal customers increased their online spending.

In recent years, the Postal Service has teamed up with United Parcel Service UPS +0.08% and FedEx Corp. FDX +0.07% , which will hand off their packages to USPS mailmen to deliver the last mile to homes. That business is expected to continue to grow. "The future of packages—that's seven days a week," said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe.

Earlier this week, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.16% said that it would tap the Postal Service to deliver orders on Sunday, beginning immediately.

Still, the package business is only about a fifth of total Postal Service revenues. First-class mail revenue fell 2.4% and total mail volume fell nearly 1%, compared to the prior year, even with an uptick in the 2012 election cycle.

The agency is saddled with a congressional mandate that requires it to prefund $5.6 billion annually for health benefits for future retirees. The agency defaulted on the payments for the third time last year, but still has to account for the charge in earnings. It used up its credit line with the U.S. Treasury Department, which means it has no borrowing room.

The agency doesn't receive an annual taxpayer subsidy. It is reimbursed by Congress for services like delivering mail to the blind, and it raises revenue by selling stamps and postal-related products.

just another bloated agency.....another proverbial hole in the boat, we keep floating....just barely

Yes I do want to make the post office as a government entity that is doing very well sans the Republican hamstringing on it.

The GOP passed a really stupid law saying that the PO has to fund its retirement 75 ****ing years in advance and do it in just 10 years. That mandate puts the PO in the hole around 5 to 6 billion dollars every year before they do a single damn thing. No other private nor public organization has done or has to do anything even remotely close to that. This is the Republican shotgun blast in the bottom of the boat so that they can say that government orgs don't work. Take that stupid Republican hamstring off the post office and in the just the first half of the fiscal year it's made a billion dollar operating costs PROFIT.

That's not the only hamstringing that the GOP has done to the USPS. They have very tight restrictions making it against the law for them to make a freegin' copy of a document that you need a copy of. The PO could do loads of things to make it even more profitable but it literally takes an act of congress to merely LET THEM DO ANY DAMN THING AT ALL. And guess whose standing there making sure that they can't expand their abilities and improve their performance. Yeppers... the Grand 'ol Party poopers.

So tell your party to stop trying to destroy the government by blowing holes in it.

*edit... btw... now that the PO has a giant pool of money they've raised for their retirement, you just watch how it gets pilfered away from them. That's a foretelling from me to you that you can bank on.

Originally Posted by Moderate Right

The sad fact is that having a pedophile win is better than having a Democrat in office. I'm all for a solution where a Republican gets in that isn't Moore.